Architecture and Performance of a Scalable Telemetry Acquisition and Distribution Infrastructure

As the cost of embedded devices, sensors, and wireless networking decreases, the economic viability of intel- ligent services that sense conditions in the physical world and trigger responses to them becomes increas- ingly attractive. Sensor networks for environmental monitoring and an urban area´s population of trucks and automobiles are examples of existing physical infrastructures that can be supported by such services. We have developed a services-oriented, specification- based, ubiquitous computing platform called TOPAZ that abstracts common ubiquitous computing functions and makes them accessible to any application provider through Web-service-based, metered interfaces. In this paper, we describe a scalable architecture of teleme- try service that acquires, processes, and distributes telemetry data and analyze its performance results. Our results demonstrate that through intelligent ag- gregation of event streams and controlled object allo- cation schemes, it is possible to support high event rates using off-the-shelf Web application-server soft- ware and hardware.